The Roanoke Times to lay off 10 employees for Iowa-based owner Lee Enterprises’ plan
For Immediate Release: Sept. 4, 2020
Contact: (540) 339-7635
ROANOKE, Va. — The Roanoke Times will lay off 10 employees in October as part of Iowa-based owner Lee Enterprises’ plan to consolidate newspaper design work in the Midwest.
Lee informed members of the Timesland News Guild bargaining committee on Thursday afternoon that the company had rejected the union’s proposal to establish a hub in Roanoke that would keep design work on site and provide a new revenue stream through custom publications and web services for area businesses.
Despite receiving emails from more than 1,500 readers urging the company to keep jobs in Virginia — as well as letters from numerous business groups, elected leaders and 122 former Roanoke Times journalists — Lee Enterprises officials declined to seek a new opportunity to sustain local journalism in the region.
“This is a truly sad day for The Roanoke Times and for Southwest Virginia,” said Tonia Moxley, chairwoman of the Timesland News Guild, a unit of The Washington-Baltimore News Guild (NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America). “Despite an opportunity to embrace and grow in Virginia, Lee Enterprises has chosen to outsource our journalism jobs to the Midwest. I’m heartbroken because our newsroom is losing so much homegrown and amazing talent, but it’s really a loss for the region and the state. On behalf of the guild, I want to thank all our supporters, including state senators and representatives from both sides of the aisle, dozens of local leaders and hundreds of readers for advocating for your local news coverage.”
The elimination of 10 copy editing and design jobs amounts to nearly 20% of the newsroom’s unionized workforce. These include three full-time and seven part-time positions.
Management began notifying affected employees Thursday afternoon.
“I am sending this email to let you know your position is being eliminated effective close of business Friday, October 23, 2020,” it read. “As you know, this is a corporate restructuring that involves the Lee Design Center, and in no way is a reflection of the work you have done here at The Roanoke Times.”
The company’s design hubs are located in Madison, Wisconsin, and Munster, Indiana. While the company says it is willing to hire designers who would work remotely, Lee has not provided any guarantee yet that employees laid off from The Roanoke Times would be hired. And the company is not currently hiring copy editors.
The guild will proceed to bargain aggressively with the company over the terms of the layoffs, to ensure that workers receive fair severance, benefits and opportunities.
Starting in October, the pages of The Roanoke Times no longer will be produced in Roanoke.
The union expresses its deepest gratitude to all the community members, elected officials and business leaders who gave their time, energy and support to advocating a plan that would maintain and grow jobs in Roanoke. We are humbled by the hundreds of comments readers submitted to Lee company officials that extolled the importance of The Roanoke Times to their lives, that stressed the need for local journalism, that highlighted the unique perspectives and decades of institutional knowledge that local copy editors and designers bring to the newspaper. We are sorry the company does not agree.
### About The Roanoke Times: Serving Roanoke and Southwest Virginia since its founding in 1886 by M.H. Claytor, The Roanoke Times publishes a daily print and online newspaper to about 30,000 print subscribers and more than 40,000 daily digital readers. Widely recognized for hard-hitting investigative stories on subprime lending, urban renewal, segregation, poverty, immigration and government corruption, the paper has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist three times. In the mid-2000s, The Roanoke Times was ranked as the best-read newspaper of its size in the country, according to market research firm Scarborough. It remains the largest professional news outlet in Southwest Virginia, employing roughly 50 journalists. After Oct. 23, it will employ roughly 40 journalists.
### About The NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America: The NewsGuild-CWA represents more than 24,000 journalists and other media workers in the U.S., Canada and Puerto Rico, including The Charlottesville Daily Progress, The Virginian-Pilot, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune.
